Over the weekend a Saildrone -- a 23-foot long uncrewed marine robot -- withstood the tempestuous seas around Antarctica to complete the first-ever circumnavigation of the continent by a drone. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists collaborated with autonomous vehicle specialists, Saildrone, to test whether the seafaring robot could survive the rough waters, and make successful scientific observations. NOAA needs to gauge how much carbon dioxide -- the potent greenhouse gas now amassing in the atmosphere -- the southern seas are absorbing from the air, and it hopes Saildrones can help. Overall, the oceans soak up a huge amount of the CO2 that humanity emits into the atmosphere (some 30 percent), which has substantially curbed Earth's accelerating temperature rise. Now, understanding how much carbon the oceans will likely soak up in the future is critical to grasping how Earth's increasingly disrupted climate will transform society and the natural world.

Trevor has been an investor, advisor and operator for cutting-edge technology companies for 15 years with multiple successful exits, and is a regular contributor to business and technology publications such as Inc, Forbes, TechCrunch and Mashable. Trevor currently serves as the CEO of Perch, the leader in interactive Physical Digital retail displays that can detect when customers approach, touch or pick up products and then respond with digital experiences that consistently drive 30-80% sales lift. Trevor is a native New Yorker, an avid fisherman (he caught a 600 lb Black Marlin), an amateur chef and an adventure scuba diver who has dived on every continent including Antarctica.

Robots can drive on the plains and craters of Mars, but what if we could explore cliffs, polar caps and other hard-to-reach places on the Red Planet and beyond? Designed by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a four-limbed robot named LEMUR (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot) can scale rock walls, gripping with hundreds of tiny fishhooks in each of its 16 fingers and using artificial intelligence (AI) to find its way around obstacles. In its last field test in Death Valley, California, in early 2019, LEMUR chose a route up a cliff while scanning the rock for ancient fossils from the sea that once filled the area. For Climbing Robots, the Sky's the Limit: The climbing robot LEMUR rests after scaling a cliff in Death Valley, California. The robot uses special gripping technology that has helped lead to a series of new, off-roading robots that can explore other worlds.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech LEMUR was originally conceived as a repair robot for the International Space Station.

An important problem in forensic analyses is identifying the provenance of materials at a crime scene, such as biological material on a piece of clothing. This procedure, known as geolocation, is conventionally guided by expert knowledge of the biological evidence and therefore tends to be application-specific, labor-intensive, and subjective. Purely data-driven methods have yet to be fully realized due in part to the lack of a sufficiently rich data source. However, high-throughput sequencing technologies are able to identify tens of thousands of microbial taxa using DNA recovered from a single swab collected from nearly any object or surface. We present a new algorithm for geolocation that aggregates over an ensemble of deep neural network classifiers trained on randomly-generated Voronoi partitions of a spatial domain. We apply the algorithm to fungi present in each of 1300 dust samples collected across the continental United States and then to a global dataset of dust samples from 28 countries. Our algorithm makes remarkably good point predictions with more than half of the geolocation errors under 100 kilometers for the continental analysis and nearly 90% classification accuracy of a sample's country of origin for the global analysis. We suggest that the effectiveness of this model sets the stage for a new, quantitative approach to forensic geolocation.

Vikram Mahidhar reminds us all that AI is only as good as the humans supervising it and programming it. The biases and artefacts that come out of the processing are reflective of the biases programmed in at the beginning. A program trained to recognise totalled car bodies for insurance purposes, for example, will need close supervision of its decision-making outputs, for regulatory and consumer confidence and acceptance of the decision. There is a call and a growth in a new class of AI--one that is explainable, and that builds trust by providing evidence. Vikram also reminds us that a governance strategy is key to engendering trust in our organisation, processes and people.

Data scientists are one of the most hirable specialists today, but it's not so easy to enter this profession without a "Projects" field in your resume. Furthermore, you need the experience to get the job, and you need the job to get the experience. Seems like a vicious circle, right? Also, the great advantage of data science projects is that each of them is a full-stack data science problem. Additionally, this means that you need to formulate the problem, design the solution, find the data, master the technology, build a machine learning model, evaluate the quality, and maybe wrap it into a simple UI.

Boaty McBoatface may be better known for its name than for its oceangoing prowess. But the autonomous underwater vehicle and darling of the internet is headed to greater things: embarking on the longest journey of an AUV by far, with an uninterrupted, roughly 2,000-mile crossing of the Arctic Ocean. The submersible robot got its moniker when it became the consolation prize in a 2016 publicity stunt. The United Kingdom's Natural Environmental Research Council had created an online poll to name the country's new polar research ship. The public picked "Boaty McBoatface" (suggested by a BBC radio announcer), but the British government nixed the idea and named the ship after naturalist David Attenborough.

When Detroit-based luxury goods brand Shinola began working on its new Vinton watch, the team designed with a woman in mind, but testing the product through analytics platform MakerSights, which correlates consumer feedback with historical sales data, revealed the style appealed to all genders. As a result, the brand deepened its buy-in on those by about 70 per cent. "You never design by data," says Shinola CEO Tom Lewand, "but the data provides a compass as you're navigating a hunch." In other words, Shinola already had a great vision – and the data enhanced it. MakerSights is among a new class of data-driven analytics platforms that combine factors such as search queries, social media activity, e-commerce sell-throughs and consumer feedback to provide clues into what is most likely to become a trend.

On Wednesday, a polar vortex brought bitter cold to the Midwest. Overnight, Chicago reached a low of 21 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, making it slightly colder than Antarctica, Alaska, and the North Pole. Wind chills were 64 degrees below zero in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and 45 degrees below zero in Buffalo, North Dakota, according to the National Weather Service. Schools, restaurants, and businesses closed, and more than 1,000 flights have been canceled. Even the United States Postal Service stalled mail delivery, temporarily.

A gigantic cavity two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall has been found growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. About the size of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is currently responsible for approximately 4 percent of global sea level rise. It holds enough ice to raise the world ocean a little over 2 feet (65 centimeters) and backstops neighboring glaciers that would raise sea levels an additional 8 feet (2.4 meters) if all the ice were lost. About the size of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is currently responsible for approximately 4 percent of global sea level rise. A gigantic cavity two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall has been found growing at the bottom of it.